Gun Control is Violence

Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.”

Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with an opposition to disarmament. But there really is nothing to reconcile once you understand, as Gandhi said on another occasion, that “the State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form.”

Gun-control advocates have long associated themselves with the cause of anti-violence. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says it all in its name. In the midst of high-profile mass shootings in 2012 — at a Wisconsin Sikh temple, a Colorado movie theater, and a Connecticut elementary school — we immediately heard calls for greater firearms restrictions in the name of domestic peace. Those of us who resisted this agenda were often decried for insensitivity toward the horrors of violence against the innocent. Gun controllers seem not to recognize that their policy itself encapsulates violence.